Back in the Day with Steve Beck: “Sustainability has just always been in my bones …"

Expert Gardener Steve Beck on half a century of greenery, growth, and the origins of farming at Esalen — from clearing the land to planting the original crops to building the fields that now sustain the faculty, guests, and staff. “We kind of invented the whole thing,” says Beck. “It was like we were reinventing the world.”

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I came to Esalen nearly 50 years ago, in 1974. 

In my university days, I studied psychology, so I'd read lots of books about people that were currently at Esalen or had been at Esalen. I was traveling with a lady friend at the time and we came to the baths in the middle of the night. In the morning, I asked if there was a way to stay.

The work study program was just beginning, but it cost like $75 or something. I didn't have $75. So I left. Eventually, I came back down and just volunteered, which back then meant I slept on the highway. I worked in the garden— weeding onions. After about two weeks, they started feeding me. I was eating a lot of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches before that. 

I was determined to stay, though. There were wonderful people here: Stan Grof, Gregory Bateson, and Al Huang. Psychodrama and Gestalt. My thought was to stay for a year, take all the classes I could and then go on my way again. But after a year, I wasn't done. 

More than anything else, I started to just seriously fall in love with the land. A piece of land with hot and cold running water, a redwood forest, an ocean — just a magical place. And then there was a great community.

There was no farm at the time. It was just wildland, except for a small pot farm hidden in the bushes. I went from weeding the onions to working in the kitchen as a cook’s helper and a dishwasher. Robin Williams was also a dishwasher here, so I take great pride in having been one at Esalen.

In 1977, the gas crisis was happening and it was like, Oh, my God, we're all going to hell. We understood we needed to rely on ourselves.

“Organic” wasn’t really a thing. It was a time when you would go into the natural food store and there would be two bins at the entrance with really bad looking fruit — like oranges that had fallen off a truck or something. They were supposedly “organic.”

We ventured into this whole sustainability thing. There were some ideas that were unusual, like when we bought a small boat so we could go out and fish. The first time the boat went out, it flipped over and the surf lost all the gear. That was the end of that. 

The thing that stuck was the farm. In 1981, Bruce Neib and Steve Harper cleared the land over there. It was very rocky. So we took out big boulders and put in the infrastructure, the water system. Some trees had been planted, some blackberries had been planted, but there were no real crops yet.

We kind of invented the whole thing. Sustainability has just always been in my bones. And so I just got a little nutty with the compost. I mean, I just loved it. The idea of taking all that stuff and turning it into this rich amendment for the tilth and fertilizing of the soil. It was just amazing. 

We were doing it by the tens of tons, with literally dump trucks full of cardboard being eaten by worms.

I took everything, every scrap of anything that had ever grown at Esalen, all of the stuff from the grounds, all of the stuff from the kitchen, all of the leftovers from the harvest, all the cardboard that ever came through the place. It would all go over to our compost pile. There were some fishermen down south who were going out in small boats and catching about 300 pounds of rockfish. They’d sell the filets for thirty-five cents a pound, then give me the skins and the bones and the heads, barrels of fish guts. There were deer off the highway, too. It all went in. 

We just would work things out with experience. We made all the mistakes that we could make. The farm was where we would grow large crops in series. We were doing really good in the summers. The kitchen would be buying things like tomatoes and peppers, but the rest completely came from the garden and farm.

A good day of harvest would be to fill the back of a pickup, wash it all, and get everything into the kitchen walk-in. During the winter we would take one field at the farm and plant it all with brassicas: kales and chards and things like that. And because it's winter, it would last all winter long.

All of the compost that we made came to the garden. It was always organic. We didn't use pesticides. The one time I tried pesticides was when we had cabbage maggots. The maggot eats the stem of the broccoli, and it was a real problem. So I thought, okay, you know, I've had it with this. I bought some pesticide, mixed it up, put it in a little spray bottle, and I would just give a little squirt around the base of the plant. Well, it was awful. I had worms coming up and dying on the ground, and that was the end of that. There are better ways. 

Permaculture — oh, God! Permaculture sold really well. Nobody actually did permaculture, but everybody taught permaculture. There was never anybody that I knew that took it seriously. 

You know, maybe there are some good things from permaculture. I have never seen a good example of it. There have to be someplace, but I don't know where they are. But there's an awful lot of permaculture teachers and workshops.

In the mid-80s, I met this fellow named Amigo Bob. He's kind of famous in California organic agriculture. He and I became friends, and we set up a number of invited conferences at Esalen. Michael Murphy was open to it, and it was not a big deal to take the Big House and Little House for a five-day period and invite these people in. Amigo Bob had the contacts, Esalen had the space, and we would raise money for transportation and whatever else. 

It's not an overstatement to say that we had the best people in agriculture come to these. Some of the California people once wanted to rename organic agriculture. Some folks wanted to call it “regenerative.” We went back and forth. Everybody wanted to get rid of “organic” because all organic meant to the consumer was, you won't die from eating this food. 

It was so exciting; we hardly slept during that week. People up all night long going back and forth. Presentations and sessions during the day and people down at the baths again in the middle of the night working all this stuff out. It's not a big deal now, and regenerative has kind of taken the lead, but at the time, it was like we were reinventing the world.

Farming here, gardening here at Esalen, is so wonderful. It's just this constant invention. Walking on the rocks below the baths is grounding. Running on those rocks, where you don't know where the next step is gonna come from, and magically, a rock appears, and the next, and the next. And then to have the land become the cells in our bodies — that's important.